Chorus: Electronic Research: RFP Review

RWP (Windows 95/NT)	Chorus « Electronic Research

Reference Web Poster: Serve Your Bibliographical Database Via the Web Reviewed by John G. Norman Department of English The Ohio State University

Reference Web Poster (RWP) is a new product from Research Information Systems (the makers of Reference Manager and ProCite) that can serve a bibliographical database over the web. This is an impressive and innovative product and will be of great interest to any scholar who has an existing database he or she wishes to share with the world or within a college, university, or research community.

Before discussing the hardware and software requirements and the installation procedure, let me cut to the chase and demonstrate what the program looks like. Once RWP is installed on a server, one may open a web page remotely and browse the database. (If you'd like to try RWP, go to the on-line bibliography of Ohio State's Program in Computers in Composition and Literature and enter search terms such as "writing.") In this example, I've selected the database "jgn.enl," which happens to be my EndNote bibliographical database with the many texts I've read or intend to read, as well as everything I've ever cited in any piece of writing since the beginning of my scholarly career (5323 entries so far). Much of my research concerns the relations of English literature and medicine in the seventeenth century, so I've entered the keyword "anatomy":

View 1: Entering a search term

I click "Start Search," and the results are immediately displayed: View 2: Search Results

At this point, even if there are a few niceties that need to be addressed, it should be clear from the example that this initial version of RWP makes it very easy to make a database available to the world.

Requirements

To run this product you'll need a Windows 95+/NT 4.0+ PC that has dedicated access to the Internet; and you'll need to be running an HTTP server. At many colleges and universities, this could be your office computer. If you're reading web pages from your office and it's not over a phone line, you may be all set. There may still be a few gotchas: for instance, in order for other folks to find your web site, you will need an IP number that doesn't change--some sites assign IP numbers on the fly. At other sites, you may only have a numerical version of your IP number, and you may have to talk to your local netmaster in order to obtain a regular hostname. Finally, your site may have rules about running servers off of office PCs. Depending on the configuration of your network, it's possible for a server or two to swamp a local area network: You may be better off asking the manager of a central server to install the RWP software there.

Installation

The installation is pretty easy; I'm only going to describe the process in cursory detail. If you are not familiar with the terminology, it's likely that you should get some expert help from your computer center rather than doing this yourself.

Publisher:
Research Information Systems (risinfo@risinc.com)

System Requirements:
Windows 95+ or NT 4.0+; 32-bit TCP/IP protocol stack (included with Windows 95/NT); dedicated access to a TCP/IP network; HTTP server software; web browser; bibliographical database in one of the following formats: Reference Manager 8.0+ for Windows 95+, ProCite 4.0+ for Windows 95+, EndNote 2.0+ for Windows 95+ [the EndNote database may also be a Macintosh database mounted on a PC]); Pentium 90 or better; 16 MB RAM (32 recommended); 6 MB free disk space; 3.5" diskette drive; mouse.

Version:
Latest: 1.1
Reviewed: 1.1

Availability:
Commercial software available at retailers and from the publisher. Directly from RIS: $149.95.

Demo:
Demonstration software is not available for download, but one can access a demonstration database over the web from the RIS Demo Page.

Screen Capture:
(Click for larger image)

View 3: Server Status

View 4: Server Properties

View 5: Search Content Properties